They take geneology very seriously, but they use the information to "baptize the dead". Catholic parishes were told not to allow Mormons to look through their baptismal records for this reason. Many Mormons who had their ancestors posthumously baptized will update their Ancestry.com info as being baptized Mormon. I have a friend who was surprised to see her Irish grandmother listed as being Mormon!

As for the rest of the information, you can find some interesting stuff and connect with distance cousins.

They take geneology very seriously, but they use the information to "baptize the dead". Catholic parishes were told not to allow Mormons to look through their baptismal records for this reason. Many Mormons who had their ancestors posthumously baptized will update their Ancestry.com info as being baptized Mormon. I have a friend who was surprised to see her Irish grandmother listed as being Mormon!

As for the rest of the information, you can find some interesting stuff and connect with distance cousins.

Does it only give you the history of your family in the United States, or can they trace it back further?

Does it only give you the history of your family in the United States, or can they trace it back further?

They do have records from around the world, but, that is subject to how well the country kept records.
My father's line is Irish. I've traced the family to England around the mid-1800s. Before that the trail grows cold. When the potato famine hit in the 1850s, many irish (along with mine) fled to scotland.
Part of my father's line is French. I traced them to the infamous Alsace-Lorraine region between France and Germany.
My mothers line is Czechoslovakian and Bohemian (which in the 19th century were right next to each other. It is impossible to trace this line because of the turmoil that part of the world is constantly in.
An added challenge is the names themselves. They might be shortened, changed, pronounced or spelt differently.

Are you absolutely sure that ancestry.com is run by the Mormon church? This has been a sort of urban legend for years, but there doesn't seem to be proof, and in fact ancestry's legal team once denied the connection.

They take geneology very seriously, but they use the information to "baptize the dead". Catholic parishes were told not to allow Mormons to look through their baptismal records for this reason. Many Mormons who had their ancestors posthumously baptized will update their Ancestry.com info as being baptized Mormon. I have a friend who was surprised to see her Irish grandmother listed as being Mormon!

As for the rest of the information, you can find some interesting stuff and connect with distance cousins.

That really ticks me off. They are changing the history of the individuals beliefs and that change for future historians will now be distorted. I am outraged by this.

I don't give a hoot if they baptize the dead but to change the faith of the person on a record is downright dishonest.

Is Ancestry.com a reliable resource for genealogical research despite it being run by the Mormon church?

1) Do you have documentation that it's run by the Mormon church?
2) A census record, or military pension record, or birth record, etc., does not depend on the religious faith, or lack thereof, of the presenter. My gg/grandfather's military record is the same whether on a Mormon, Catholic, Muslim, or atheist website.

__________________"When all is said and done, we are infinitely loved."
Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium

I do not think Ancestry.com is in any way officially linked to the Mormon church. I do think it was started and run by Mormons. I have never seen any evidence of record tampering. I found the Catholic Church records for my European ancestors at the LDS Family History Library on microfilm. Yes, they do their own "baptism of the dead", hence their interest in genealogy, but they do not alter original records.

To the question about whether ancestry dot com is accurate: the records are records, a census page is a census page, in that sense it's certainly accurate.

Where you can run into trouble is when you start sharing or importing information from other "researchers" who have input their own poorly cited family trees into the system. There you can easily find mistakes, inaccuracies, and un-sourced conclusions that may not be accurate.

As far as I know, ancestry dot com is nor "run" by the mormon church, although the owners may be Mormon.

Well, actually, looks like it's a public company. Presumably anyone can invest.